WoW – More fun together!

Three Suggestions to Make Healing More Fun

Blizzard stated that the changes they were making in Cataclysm were to make healing more fun. Some of them worked; some, I think, missed the mark. The problem is that they seem to have decided that the way to make healing more “fun” was to make everything in the environment want to kill you. So yeah we’re not just standing in one place spamming our one heal; we’re running around like crazy spamming the only heal we can get off in time and praying we don’t go OOM. Not really a major fun upgrade IMO. On the other hand, I like the idea of having to use some intelligence to choose what heal to use at any given time and they have done that better than it was in Wrath.

But I can think of a couple suggestions that would make healing way more fun to me.

Get Rid Of Healing Aggro

Or at least nerf it. Say we’ve got a big trash pack, six or so guys. The tank marks two for cc’ing but that’s all the party can put out of the game. He skulls one and it’ll be down fast – but I still have to get past that first fifteen seconds of tank damage. I’m a druid. My choices are to pre-hot the tank, watch him pull, watch two of them run right past him and smash my face in due to healing aggro. Or wait til he has aggro then try to heal him up from 10% health before something kills him. Yuck. And I’ve had just this dilemma multiple times this expansion – think of the hallway leading to the third boss in Throne of Tides. Or half of Grim Batol.

Or we’re fighting a boss who spawns zillions of adds. All of whom are really, really mad at me. The tank is pulling them off me as fast as they spawn but every one gets in one good hit on me…. yuck! Not fun at all.

So why does healing have to cause aggro at all? Would it really be game breaking to reduce it to, say, 10% of what it is currently? That way if we wipe I still die too. I think it would be a big quality of life change for us.

Less “GTFO Of The Fire”, more “You Fail”

I love that in this expansion, doing things wrong has consequences. I hate that most of the time the consequence is damage. Most of the time when a dpser or the tank screws up, it would be easy to say the party wiped due to not enough healing. Stood in fire? Not enough healing. Spell reflected yourself to death? Not enough healing. A good party will look for the real cause – but a good party has less stupid moments anyway.

No, what I like are fights like Corla the Herald of Twilight and her evolving adds. Screw up there and you get mind controlled. It’s really easy to see who fails. Or the HOO boss with the radiance aura thing where if you’re looking at it you get stunned. Nice feedback there, and it’s not the healer’s fault when you die! Or Baron Ashbury, where not interrupting him causes him to heal, not do more damage. Not the healer’s fault!

So let’s have more fight mechanics like that. Maybe if you stand in a void zone too long you turn into a giant frozen statue for ten seconds unable to do anything.

And for the love of all that’s good and holy, Blizzard, please fix all the places where an area of effect is bigger than the visual clue that you’re in bad stuff…

Stand And Deliver

I want a cooldown that fits organically into every healing class, maybe a really long cooldown like ten minutes. You pop it, and you enter siege mode; you can’t move, but you are more or less invulnerable for thirty seconds. Or twenty, or whatever. Maybe make it so you can’t do any damaging spells, if that would break things.

In short, for thirty seconds I can stay right where I am, ignoring fire and knockbacks and whatever else, and heal. Overpowered? Maybe… but if every healer had the same basic cooldown, Blizzard could find a way to make it work, right?

There’s already built in class mechanics that could be tweaked for this. For druids, give our Treeform roots and make us invulnerable. For paladins, give them a couple talents that makes their bubble consistent with this idea. Let priests pop fail-angel rather than it being tied to death. Give shaman a totem they could drop that would root them but make them invulnerable.

I think this could be really cool, and another way for us to have to use every tool we’ve got, think several steps ahead – but be just a bit more forgiving than things currently are.

What Would You Change?

A little tweak, or something way out there – what would you like to see different?

I HATE the current philosophy on healing. That being nerf throughput – up heal pools – developer “hopes” this balances.

Bigger pools only mean we have to worry about toons getting two shot-ed not one shot-ed. HPS nerfs mean we are constantly worried about time to get tanks out of second shot dead after first shot lands.

Frankly Blizzard is in a pickle and they know it. Every time they try to get healing balanced the Paladin class mechanics break it. Pallys were OP in wrath they are OP now in PVP and PVE.

We really have no choice in the future much like paragon we all need to raid heavy pally healing and that’s it. Don’t fight city hall any more and just put the plate on.

tweak I would go with?
– 2 AOE heals for each class one fire and forget one channeled
– 1 GOOD (I mean equal to all druid hots good) as a buffer for first pull damage [sure put that puppy on a cooldown I don’t care] I would love to heal in a world where I DONT get behind the healing curve EVERY PULL – you know like give us time to actually LOOK at someone besides the tank on pulls
– a lightwell that DOES NOT depend on clicking (you see ever since the 5man TOC where the priests cast lightwells that spray heals… I’ve said hmmm can I join you guys)
– Implement Splash heals to partially heal melee who invariably off-tank on every pull

ah well they won’t listen… I tried in the beta but Ghostcrawler blew me off

Bristal has some good suggestions for punishing DPS – I particularly like the ‘longer cast times’ one, and in a similar vein I’d suggest having debuffs that reduce a player’s DPS significantly if they don’t move out of the Bad. This would work on two levels: first off, against the meter-whores it’d directly affect their position on the meter; second, there’s no way it can be blamed on lack of heals (even less so if the debuff can’t be removed).

Maybe other effects could include:
– The player’s target randomly being unselected.
– Visual effects like blurring, darkening or whiteouts.
– Movement-affecting effects, like being drunk but much worse.

Basically, things that don’t directly tax the healer, and also serve to make the bad DPS look like idiots.